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Oliver Stone and Edward Snowden

Oliver Stone's untitled Edward Snowden film, starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the NSA whistleblower, is going the indie route after failing to find a taker among the major Hollywood studios.

Open Road Filmsis picking up U.S. rights to the movie, while Wild Bunch is preselling foreign rights to international buyers at the American Film Market this week in Santa Monica. Earlier this month, the project was shopped to several Hollywood studios, but no deal materialized, according to insiders.

See more The 21 Best Movies About Whistleblowers

Sources say studios are nervous after DreamWorks' The Fifth Estate, about whistleblower Julian Assange, bombed at the box office in fall 2013 grossing just $8.6 million worldwide.

Open Road is no stranger to political films. It is also handling Jon Stewart's upcoming Rosewater in the U.S.

Stone's screenplay is based on Luke Harding's The Snowden Files: The Inside Story of the World's Most Wanted Man and Time of the Octopus, the upcoming novel from Snowden's Russian lawyer Anatoly Kucherena. CAA is representing domestic rights.

Harding's nonfiction book traces Snowden's move from Hawaii to Hong Kong, where he met with documentary filmmaker Laura Poitras and journalist Glenn Greenwaldand handed over top-secret NSA documents. Snowden later flew to Moscow, where he sought asylum. Kucherena's fictional take on the story is based on the lawyer's time with Snowden while he waited in limbo at the Moscow airport before the Russian government decided to grant him asylum.

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Oliver Stone's Edward Snowden Film Fails to Find Major ...

WILMINGTON, Del. (AP) - When Business Insider wrote about University of Delaware graduate student Jim Dessicinos statue of Edward Snowden appearing in New Yorks Union Square Park last month, the reporter noted that none of the dozen passers-by they talked to could identify who the statue depicted.

For Dessicino, a 29-year-old Atlantic City, New Jersey, native, it could have been a blow to his confidence as an artist, having spent months creating the 9-foot, 220-pound figure out of gypsum cement, clay, steel and foam.

But just hours earlier when he was unloading the statue from a van to bring it to the Manhattan park, he heard a man on the bustling New York streets shout, Oh, my God! Is that Edward Snowden?

In a stroke of pure coincidence that is still hard to believe, that man happened to be with journalist/activist/blogger Glenn Greenwald, whose reporting last year in Britains The Guardian first disclosed the secret U.S. surveillance programs using leaked documents from Snowden, a former National Security Agency contractor.

The person most closely associated with Snowden, now living in Russia, just happened to be having breakfast with fellow journalist Jeremy Scahill at Coffee Shop restaurant when Dessicinos van pulled up and the super-sized Snowden popped out.

I thought, You have to be kidding me. I wasnt convinced it was him, but then I walked up to him and it was Glenn Greenwald, Dessicino says. And (Greenwald) was more confused than I was about all of this. He was dumbfounded, but really excited and happy to see it.

After the chance meeting, Scahill took a photo of Greenwald with the statue and posted it to Twitter, writing, So, @ggreenwald & I were having breakfast & a truck pulls up with a statue of Edward Snowden.

Greenwald, who lives in Brazil and was visiting New York to attend the premiere of the documentary Citizenfour at Lincoln Center that night, soon retweeted it.

The result was a hectic few hours for Dessicino, whose statue is currently greeting museum-goers at the entrance of the Delaware Center for the Contemporary Arts (200 S. Madison St., Wilmington) through Jan. 4. (The statue even has its own Twitter account: @EdSnowdenStatue.)

Reporters from publications like the New York Daily News, Vice and Buzzfeed descended on Union Square to report on the statue. As Dessicino did one interview after another, representatives from the New York City Department of Parks & Recreation soon arrived and told Dessicino he had to remove the statue since he didnt have a proper permit.

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UD student's 9-foot Edward Snowden statue at DCCA

Laura Poitras on the roof of Archimedes Exhibitions in Berlin. Poitras moved to Berlin to escape the attentions of the US security services. Photograph: Malte Jaeger for the Observer

Its the not knowing thats the hardest thing, Laura Poitras tells me. Not knowing whether Im in a private place or not. Not knowing if someones watching or not. Though shes under surveillance, she knows that. It makes working as a journalist hard but not impossible. Its on a personal level that its harder to process. I try not to let it get inside my head, but I still am not sure that my home is private. And if I really want to make sure Im having a private conversation or something, Ill go outside.

Poitrass documentary about Edward Snowden, Citizenfour, has just been released in cinemas. She was, for a time, the only person in the world who was in contact with Snowden, the only one who knew of his existence. Before she got Glenn Greenwald and the Guardian on board, it was just her talking, electronically, to the man she knew only as Citizenfour. Even months on, when I ask her if the memory of that time lives with her still, she hesitates and takes a deep breath: It was really very scary for a number of months. I was very aware that the risks were really high and that something bad could happen. I had this kind of responsibility to not fuck up, in terms of source protection, communication, security and all those things, I really had to be super careful in all sorts of ways.

Bad, not just for Snowden, I say? Not just for him, she agrees. Were having this conversation in Berlin, her adopted city, where shed moved to make a film about surveillance before shed ever even made contact with Snowden. Because, in 2006, after making two films about the US war on terror, she found herself on a watch list. Every time she entered the US and I travel a lot she would be questioned. It got to the point where my plane would land and they would do whats called a hard stand, where they dispatch agents to the plane and make everyone show their passport and then I would be escorted to a room where they would question me and oftentimes take all my electronics, my notes, my credit cards, my computer, my camera, all that stuff. She needed somewhere else to go, somewhere she hoped would be a safe haven. And that somewhere was Berlin.

Whats remarkable is that my conversation with Poitras will be the first of a whole series of conversations I have with people in Berlin who either are under surveillance, or have been under surveillance, or who campaign against it, or are part of the German governments inquiry into it, or who work to create technology to counter it. Poitrass experience of understanding the sensation of what its like to know youre being watched, or not to know but feel a prickle on the back of your neck and suspect you might be, is far from unique, it turns out. But then, perhaps more than any other city on earth, Berlin has a radar for surveillance and the dark places it can lead to.

There is just a very real historical awareness of how information can be used against people in really dangerous ways here, Poitras says. There is a sensitivity to it which just doesnt exist elsewhere. And not just because of the Stasi, the former East German secret police, but also the Nazi era. Theres a book Jake Appelbaum talks a lot about thats called IBM and the Holocaust and it details how the Nazis used punch-cards to systemise the death camps. Were not talking about that happening with the NSA [the US National Security Agency], but it shows how this information can be used against populations and how it poses such a danger.

Jake Jacob Appelbaum is an American who helped develop the anonymous Tor network, and went on to work with WikiLeaks. Hes also in Berlin, having discovered that he was the subject of a secret US grand jury investigation, and it was he who advised Poitras to come here. Id been filming him doing this extraordinary work training activists in anti-surveillance techniques in the Middle East and I asked him where I should go, because I just didnt think I could keep my footage safe in the US. And he said Germany because of its privacy laws. And Berlin because of all the groups doing anti-surveillance work here.

Peoples reactions in Germany to the Snowden revelations differed to those in Britain or America. There was full-on national outrage when it was revealed that even chancellor Angela Merkels phone had been bugged. I know this already, vaguely, in theory, but its a different matter to actually come to Berlin and hear person after person talk about it. I start out with three names, three high-profile digital exiles who have all taken refuge in the city: Poitras, Appelbaum and Sarah Harrison, another WikiLeaker who was with Snowden during his time in transit in Sheremetyevo airport near Moscow and helped him apply for political asylum in 21 countries. But I end up with reams of others. And, I cant help thinking that Berlin, the city that found itself at the frontline of so much of the 20th centurys history, has found itself, once again, on the fracture point between two opposing world orders. And I wonder if the people I meet are the start of the internet fightback; if Berlin really is becoming a hub for a global digital resistance movement.

Is that too fanciful a word, I ask Martin Kaul, the social movements editor of Berlins most radical newspaper, Die Tageszeitung, or Taz as its known and if anyone is in a position to know, its him (he is the only social movements editor hes ever come across, he tells me). Is it a movement? Kaul ums and ahs a bit at first, especially about the idea of the city as a harbour for digital exiles, a concept Id first heard in a talk Julian Assange gave at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, earlier this year.

They are very high profile, the exiles, he says, but I dont think there are hundreds of them here, or even dozens. Id be interested to know if they are growing. But, what is true is that there were already many very influential groups here. Hacker culture is especially strong in Germany. There were a lot of people already working on these issues. And then the exiles arrived. They are like an international avant garde at the cutting edge of it.

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Berlins digital exiles: where tech activists go to escape the NSA